Tense finale in store at Ewood
BLUE-EYED BOY’S BLACKBURN VIEW
TYPICALLY Rovers in a season of agonies which began with 20 minutes of horror at home to Norwich, we now could have to wait until the final day before our fate is decided – and that’s the best-case scenario.
Ironically we could quite easily have everything go our way tomorrow and still go down even if we emerge from what’s going to be a nerve-shredding last home game with any semblance of a chance.
I’ve seen every theory possible to man expounded this week from “Villa won’t be trying and their fans will be cheering us” to “Huddersfield will rest everyone at Birmingham having made the play-offs” and while you can see a smidgen of possibly-skewed logic to it all, the only people who can save Blackburn Rovers are the 18 people selected to wear the shirt and the bloke who selects and instructs them.
They haven’t done much in the last 10 games to suggest that self-preservation is what’s really going on today but still our young hearts run free, imagining two perfect performances while everything else falls favourably to end a thoroughly miserable campaign and at least avoid adding an ignominious new low to Venkys’ wretched sevenyear tenure.
This time last season the lugubrious Paul Lambert pulled out two pretty welcome but largely meaningless wins against a pair of sides with little to play for to end his own wearisome and underwhelming spell at the helm with a little bit of a flattering flourish.
Oh, for a repeat of that, but Villa and Brentford are sides which have improved towards the back end of the season and I don’t care what anyone says, they and their managers will be gunning for a Rovers team which is surely known around the game as flaky on their own ground and virtual canon fodder away from home.
Tony Mowbray’s response to this has been to employ a caution-first approach in recent weeks but you can’t really do that and profess at the same time to start games on the front foot with attacking intent aforethought.
I didn’t see anything but the briefest of highlights from Molineux but the recurrent theme from away regulars whose verdict I usually seek out as a sensible view hammered home the point that we contributed little that was pro-active in terms of taking charge against a team customarily almost as nervy on their home patch as we are.
I realise that Villa are the kind of team that can probably hurt you on the counter with the likes of Hogan, Adomah and Kodija but the time for pussyfooting has surely passed and only a bold approach will win the day.
People are very fond of saying, when their team is largely outplayed but sneaks a goal and holds on, “the manager got his selection and tactics spot on today,” but I would be surprised if that was Mowbray’s Plan A against a side who despite underachieving hugely – and after appointing the kind of manager and spending the kind of money Rovers fans once dreamed of Venkys spending in a bid to go back up – have dangermen all over the field.
As a crowd of supporters we all like to think we can play a part in proceedings and although Ewood has never really enjoyed any kind of reputation as a simmering cauldron of passion worn on the sleeve or hostility towards visiting teams (well, except that other lot in claret and blue) it’s important that the three sides of the ground we occupy on Saturday make their presence felt faced with what seems likely to be a packed Darwen End in those colours.
Credit to Rovers for re-thinking their original decision to charge home fans Category A prices (I think that’s £29 in the Blackburn End, a lot of money to watch a failing outfit), I hope many will take advantage and I’ve tried to encourage a couple of non-regulars to come along even though I’m always ever-so-slightly miffed at season-ticket holders’ pro rata per game rate being undercut – I pay £279 for 23 games, working out at over £12 a game.
I always write to Rovers and point this slight anomaly out and got a semi-reasonable response this week but there would be no-one more delighted than me if we had the best attendance of the season and it helped eke out a victory.
Whatever befalls us, and as we all know and fear it could be the worst, I hope all will remain civil and reasonable with fel- low supporters.
Of course there’ll be an outpouring of disdain, hatred even for the owners and the inept board which made the mistake everyone saw but them in making the doomed appointment of the hapless and incompetent Owen Coyle.
Personally, I’ll just skulk off to the pub disappointed and discuss our sorry plight with mates if the (unfortunately) eminently thinkable happens, I’m just not that demonstrative a person to want to howl abuse at an object of scorn who isn’t there and probably couldn’t care less.
I asked our daughters this week if they wanted season tickets next year and the answer was a resounding “yes” whatever occurs so it looks entirely certain that we’ll be continuing our family’s century of support for at least another year.
I recently spotted that it was exactly 50 of those years ago that a midweek trip to Burnden Park with my dad finally did the trick a few dozen home games had failed to do and got me hooked, lined and sinkered as a Rovers fan.
As Van the man says: “It’s Too Late To Stop Now.”